RE: Does Bentley have recommendations for modeling wood shear wall stiffness in RAM SS?

Seth Guthrie — Wed, 24 Jan 2018 17:01:51 GMT

The tricky part with wood walls is that the stiffness is not simply a matter of the shape (due to hold downs, nailing patterns etc.). Two walls built the same way but of different lengths have dramatically different stiffness, more so than you get naturally from finite element analysis, so modifications to the wall E value are required for various wall lengths. I know people who have back-calculated the effective stiffness E' for walls based on Ram Frame deflections under unit lateral loads, but it's a pain. In the end I'm not sure how much difference it really makes in the design of a podium using 2 stage analysis.

There is some more on this topic here: https://communities.bentley.com/products/ram-staad/f/ram-staad-forum/127685/overturning-moments-on-shear-walls and in our Walls FAQ.